Building large-scale processing facilities can be extraordinarily challenging in remote locations, or under adverse conditions. One particular geography that is both remote and suffers from severe adverse conditions includes the land comprising the western provinces of Canada, where several companies are now trying to establish processing plants for removing oil from oil sands.
Given the difficulties of building a facility entirely on-site, there has been considerable interest in what we shall call 2nd Generation Modular Construction. In that technology, a facility is logically segmented into truckable modules, the modules are constructed in an established industrial area, trucked or airlifted to the plant site, and then coupled together at the plant site. Several 2nd Generation Modular Construction facilities are in place in the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, and they have been proved to provide numerous advantages in terms of speed of deployment, construction work quality, reduction in safety risks, and overall project cost. There is even an example of a Modular Helium Reactor (MHR), described in a paper by Dr. Arkal Shenoy and Dr. Alexander Telengator, General Atomics, 3550 General Atomics Court, San Diego, Calif. 92121.
2nd Generation Modular facilities have also been described in the patent literatures. An example of a large capacity oil refinery composed of multiple, self-contained, interconnected, modular refining units is described in WO 03/031012 to Shumway. A generic 2nd Generation Modular facility is described in US20080127662 to Stanfield.
Unless otherwise expressly indicated herein, Shumway and all other extrinsic materials discussed herein, and in the priority specification and attachments, are incorporated by reference in their entirety. Where a definition or use of a term in an incorporated reference is inconsistent with or contrary to the definition of that term provided herein, the definition of that term provided herein applies and the definition of that term in the reference does not apply.
There are very significant cost savings in using 2nd Generation Modular. It is contemplated, for example, that building of a process module costs US$4 in the field for every US$1 spent building an equivalent module in a construction facility. Nevertheless, despite the many advantages of 2nd Generation Modular, there are still problems. Possibly the most serious problems arise from the ways in which the various modules are inter-connected. In the prior art 2nd Generation Modular units, the fluid, power and control lines between modules are carried by external piperacks. This can be seen clearly in FIGS. 1 and 2 of WO 03/031012. In facilities using multiple, self-contained, substantially identical production units, it is logically simple to operate those units in parallel, and to provide in feed (inflow) and product (outflow) lines along an external piperack. But where small production units are impractical or uneconomical, the use of external piperacks is a hindrance.
What is needed is a new modular paradigm, in which the various processes of a plant are segmented in process blocks comprising multiple modules. We refer to such designs and implementations as 3rd Generation Modular Construction.